A Teacher Team Solves Its School’s Homework Detention Problem

(Originally titled “The Problem-Solving Power of Teachers”)

In this thoughtful Educational Leadership article, ELA teacher Ariel Sacks describes how she and her colleagues in a New York City middle school dealt with the unintended consequences of a top-down policy. The school decided that students who missed two homework assignments in a single week would be required to attend after-school detention on Wednesday. Teachers were asked to notify parents, get confirmation, put detention students on a list, and tell them to report to the designated classroom on Wednesday afternoons. 

But what seemed like a plausible plan ended up creating extra work for teachers and fostering noncompliance. After teachers notified parents, usually on Friday afternoon, there were lots of questions about homework assignments, protestations that their children had really done the work, promises to do a better job supervising their kids, and requests that a student be granted an extension or serve detention on a different day. “The process was overwhelming,” says Sacks, “and correspondences easily dragged from Friday, across the weekend, all the way through the Wednesday of the actual detention.” 

In addition, there was no guarantee that students would do their missed assignments during detention, and if they were confused about the work, help wasn’t available. The result: a lot of unproductive teacher time, some teachers circumventing the policy (which raised equity concerns), and the same students attending homework detention week after week. Often these students weren’t completing regular class work and were failing one or more subjects. Their underlying academic problems were clearly not being addressed.

A change in the school’s schedule gave Sacks and her eighth-grade team an idea. The new schedule created a block at the end of each day when teachers had “office hours” for students who needed help. Sacks’s team noticed that the students who showed up weren’t always the ones who most needed help, so they started encouraging students who weren’t completing assignments to come during office hours. This created problems when struggling students were asked to be in several teachers’ classrooms at the same time, but the team solved that by all sitting in one classroom for office hours. 

Then it hit them: why not make office hours mandatory for struggling students and substitute it for the school’s Wednesday detention? Any eighth grader could come for help, but office hours would be mandatory for the 12 students (out of 107) who weren’t completing assignments. The principal quickly approved the idea, parents and others were notified, and four days a week (Thursdays were teacher-meeting days), office hours became a regular routine for students who most needed help. The after-school office hours “became a positive space,” says Sacks, “where students helped one another as much as we helped them.” Some students didn’t show up, but teachers were able to follow up with them. 

The result? Almost all the students who came to office hours passed their classes, some students improved their homework habits and “graduated” from the program, and seventh-grade teachers heard about the system and decided to adopt it for their students. “Teachers no longer spend hours chasing after students and their families over homework detention – or feeling guilty for not doing so,” says Sacks. “More students get the help they need, even if that help is nothing more than a time and place to do their homework.” 

The moral of this story, she concludes, is that teachers can come up with effective “bottom-up” solutions to problems if they have administrators who trust them (the teachers and the ideas), empower teams to think issues through and get them vetted by colleagues, and support implementation.

“The Problem-Solving Power of Teachers” by Ariel Sacks in Educational Leadership, October 2013 (Vol. 71, #2, p. 18-22), www.ascd.org; Sacks is at wholenovels@gmail.com.

From the Marshall Memo #505